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My grandmother was a ‘Sherlock Holmes of Yiddish song,’ but she couldn’t solve the mystery of antisemitism
(JTA) — When I was younger, my family sang Yiddish songs at almost every holiday and gathering.
Funny songs, sad songs, songs about love, about the Holocaust, about hunger, about labor and resistance — the usual Yiddish fare. My Bubby, Chana Mlotek, a Yiddish archivist and ethnomusicologist, collected hundreds of them with my Zeyde, Yosl Mlotek, who became known as the address for Yiddish in America. Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer called them “the Sherlock Holmeses of Yiddish folk songs” for their investigations of Jewish music.
We would gather by the piano in my grandparents’ living room in the Bronx, with the piano being helmed by my Bubby, sometimes my great-aunt Malke Gottlieb (with whom my Bubby compiled a collection of songs from the Jewish ghettos), then my father, then my uncle. Eventually each of the eyniklekh — the grandkids — would have to sing in Yiddish.
Of course, I didn’t recognize until I got older that Yiddish songs are an incredible porthole into history, while also testifying to the vivaciousness of a people nearly destroyed and a culture almost erased. It’s through these lyrics and other stories from my grandparents that I learned the history of our people and the faith we had in America, “Dos Goldene Land,” where immigrants came to escape religious persecution. One famous song, in particular, was about the tragic letdown of this promise.
“The Ballad of Leo Frank” was about the Jewish factory manager from Atlanta. In 1913, a 14-year-old employee at his pencil factory named Mary Phagan was found dead. Frank was accused of her murder on flimsy evidence.
After a trumped-up trial, a biased jury found Frank guilty after four hours of deliberation. The case was retried, and appealed before the United States Supreme Court, without success. Hundreds of thousands of petitions were sent to Gov. John Slaton of Georgia, who eventually commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. But months later, a bloodthirsty gang, who were later to inspire the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, kidnapped Frank from jail and lynched him.
Thanks to Yiddish music, we knew all these facts. The painful details of the Frank case were heard in melancholic Yiddish songs like “The Ballad of Leo Frank” and “Lebn zol Columbus” (“Long Live Columbus”), which we as children crooned around the piano in the living room of my Bubby’s apartment.
“A bilbl hot men oysgetrakht / Oyf undzern a yidl” — they made up a blood libel about one of our Jews — goes the lyrics from one of these songs.
We sing these songs to learn about our history, hoping never to repeat it. But just a couple weeks ago, antisemitic mobs weren’t just part of a songbook. They were here, right in the heart of New York City.
Frank’s story is the subject of a new revival of a Broadway musical, “Parade,” starring Ben Platt, which opened this month at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre. During previews, members of a neo-Nazi group called The National Socialist Movement rallied outside the theater, handing out leaflets and accusing Frank of being a pedophile and a murderer. Mostly, they were there to stoke fear and rekindle the same Jew hatred that cost Frank his life more than a century ago.
This is only the latest example of what has been an alarming growth of antisemitism in the United States. Jews who grew up learning (or singing) about blood libels in Russia have always slept with one eye open, haunted by the fear that antisemitism would rear its ugly head here, too.
Just last week as I entered the subway in midtown Manhattan, I was verbally accosted by a man who lowered his shirt collar to show me his swastika tattoo. And so the story goes.
As Passover approaches, the words of the Haggadah come to mind: “b’khol dor vador” — in every generation. In every generation, enemies emerge and the responsibility to rekindle learning and reclaim identity falls upon us, each in our own unique way.
It feels fitting then that my grandparents’ anthology is now accessible to a whole new audience.
The Yosl and Chana Mlotek Yiddish Song Collection at the Workers Circle went live this week. It is a searchable, comprehensive database of Yiddish music and song, spanning centuries, genres, artists and more, bringing my grandparents’ anthologies online. Hundreds of Yiddish songs, including the Leo Frank ballad, can be freely accessed thanks to a thorough digitization process overseen by my brother, Elisha Mlotek, who served as creative director for the website.
Sponsored by the Mlotek family, this new website is a loving collaboration between the Arbeter Ring (Workers Circle) and the Mlotek family and will ensure Yiddish song and in turn Jewish history never cower in the face of prejudice. As Elisha describes the music collected on the website, “It is an essential record of our people — the richness and resilience of our culture.”
My grandfather died in 2000. Chana died in 2013, at age 91. Bubby’s piano now lives in my father’s office at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, but we still come together around song. (In fact, it was my cousin Lee who recently reminded us of the Leo Frank song he learned from my uncle in an Arbeter Ring shule, or school.)
This Thursday my Bubby’s sons, her grandchildren and even some of her great-grandchildren will participate in a tribute concert to her at the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, where Chana served as the music archivist for decades. The in-person free concert, presented in collaboration with Carnegie Hall and which can be streamed digitally, will include family friends who also happen to be some of the most special Yiddish singers of the day, including Joanne Borts, Sarah Gordon, Elmore James, Daniella Rabbani, Eleanor Reissa, Lorin Sklamberg and Steven Skybell, who played Tevye in “Fidler Afn Dakh,” the Yiddish production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Now is as welcome a time as any to celebrate Jewish life, learn a Yiddish song and discover the lessons of history along the way.
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The post My grandmother was a ‘Sherlock Holmes of Yiddish song,’ but she couldn’t solve the mystery of antisemitism appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Interviews with Holocaust survivors reveal the richness of Yiddish
Many people today prize the Yiddish of native speakers who grew up in Eastern Europe before World War II, viewing it as a mark of linguistic authenticity.
As a language of daily life that millions of Jews spoke in a range of regional dialects, Yiddish had, over the centuries, become enriched with many words and idioms that were unique to a specific location.
More than 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, very few of those speakers are still around. As a result, the Yiddish they spoke is deemed precious. Thanks to a new online resource, in which dozens of Holocaust survivors talk about their lives before, during and after the war, anyone can now hear the language of that bygone era.
There are already a number of resources that document the Yiddish of these native speakers. Among the earliest examples are 28 audio recordings made by David Boder, a psychologist who traveled from the United States to Europe in 1946 to interview Holocaust survivors. He asked them about their wartime experiences in nine different languages, including Yiddish.
Another valuable source for hearing native Yiddish speakers is the Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ). In the late 1950s, linguist Uriel Weinreich launched this project, based at Columbia University, to study Yiddish dialects and folklore. Weinreich and his colleagues taped responses from over 600 European-born Yiddish speakers to a detailed survey of their language, with over 3,000 individual questions, as in, for example: “What games did you play as a child?”
One of the largest number of recordings of these Yiddish speakers can be found in the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA), launched in 1994. Based at the University of Southern California, the VHA holds almost 50,000 video interviews with Holocaust survivors. Among these recordings, which were conducted in 32 different languages, are more than 600 entirely or partially in Yiddish. Until recently, only people who had access to the VHA, mostly through university libraries, were able to listen to this trove of Yiddish speakers as they relate their life histories. Thanks to a new online resource, known as the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), anyone can now hear these interviews.
The CSYE is the brainchild of Yiddish sociolinguist Isaac Bleaman who first worked with the VHA’s Yiddish interviews for his doctoral dissertation, where he compared the Yiddish spoken in the 2010s by Hasidim and Yiddishists. Through these recordings, Bleaman was able to explore how these two contemporary forms of Yiddish developed.
After joining the faculty at Berkeley, Bleaman sought a way to make the VHA’s Yiddish interviews more accessible to both linguists and students learning the language. Eventually, he received permission from the Shoah Foundation to use some 200 of its Yiddish videos for this purpose, and in 2022 he was awarded a multiyear grant from the National Science Foundation to establish the CSYE.
Creating this online resource entails manually transcribing the interviews, which are rendered both in transliteration and in the Yiddish alphabet. This is a painstaking process that relies on skilled speakers of Yiddish as well as other languages that the survivors may have included in the interviews. The transcripts, when synced with the videos, enable users of the CSYE to search the interviews for specific terms and topics.
A database on the CSYE lists each survivor’s name, city of birth, gender, age and dialect of Yiddish (Central, Northeastern, or Southeastern). The website also features an interactive map, showing the location of each survivor’s hometown, grouped by dialect. A different map shows where the VHA interviews were recorded in the 1990s. Ranging across Europe, the Americas, Australia and Israel, they reflect the scope of the postwar Yiddish-speaking diaspora.
In this Yiddish interview, for example, Holocaust survivor Lazar Milamed talks about his childhood in a Ukrainian village, his experiences under the Nazis and his post-war life in Brooklyn.
The CSYE also offers an interactive page that enables users to generate their own word maps to explore the geographic range of words or patterns of speech.
To demonstrate how the CSYE can be used for linguistic research and for language learning, the website provides instruction on pronunciation, as well as examples of the East European Yiddish dialects (for example, which of the interviewees said nit for the word “not” vs. those who said nisht). To date, 171 interviews, totaling more than 300 hours, have been transcribed. When this process is completed, the CSYE explains on its website, it will provide public access to “the most extensive source of conversational Yiddish ever compiled,” which will “bring the voices and narratives of native Yiddish speakers into the classroom.”
For the Yiddish student, teacher and researcher, or anyone else who loves the language, the CSYE is an extraordinary resource. Listening to survivors recount their life histories is compelling, both for the experiences they recall and for the cherished language in which they speak.
The post Interviews with Holocaust survivors reveal the richness of Yiddish appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Says US May Strike Iran Again but That Tehran Wants Deal
People walk past a mural depicting the late leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the late Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, Iran. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the United States may need to strike Iran again and that he had been an hour away from ordering an attack before postponing it.
Trump made the comments a day after saying he had paused a planned resumption of hostilities following a new proposal by Tehran to end the US-Israeli war.
“I was an hour away from making the decision to go today,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday.
Iran‘s leaders are begging for a deal, he said, adding that a new US attack would happen in coming days if no agreement was reached.
The United States has been struggling to end the war it began with Israel nearly three months ago. Trump has previously said that a deal with Tehran was close, and similarly threatened heavy strikes on Iran if it did not reach an accord.
The US president is under intense political pressure at home to reach an accord that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz – a key route for global supplies of oil and other commodities. Gas prices remain high and Trump‘s approval rating has plummeted as congressional elections loom in November.
Oil prices settled lower on Tuesday after Vice President JD Vance said Washington and Tehran had made a lot of progress in talks and neither side wanted to see a resumption of the military campaign. “We’re in a pretty good spot here,” he said.
Speaking to reporters at a White House briefing, Vance acknowledged difficulties in negotiating with a fractured Iranian leadership. “It’s not sometimes totally clear what the negotiating position of the team is,” he said, so the US is trying to make its own red lines clear.
He also said one objective of Trump‘s policy is to prevent a nuclear arms race from spreading in the region.
IRAN PROMISES RESPONSE TO ANY NEW ATTACK
In Tehran, Ebrahim Azizi, head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, said on X that pausing an attack was due to Trump‘s realization that any move against Iran would mean “facing a decisive military response.”
Iranian state media said Tehran‘s latest peace proposal involves ending hostilities on all fronts including Lebanon, the exit of US forces from areas close to Iran, and reparations for destruction caused by the US-Israeli attacks.
Tehran also sought the lifting of sanctions, release of frozen funds, and an end to the US marine blockade, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi as cited by IRNA news agency.
The terms as described in the Iranian reports appeared little changed from Iran‘s previous offer, which Trump rejected last week as “garbage.”
BOTH SIDES ‘CHANGING GOALPOSTS,’ SAYS PAKISTANI SOURCE
Reuters could not determine whether military preparations had been made for strikes that would mark a renewal of the war Trump started in late February.
Trump said on Monday that Washington would be satisfied if it could reach an agreement that prevented Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
A Pakistani source confirmed that Islamabad, which has conveyed messages between the sides since hosting the only round of peace talks last month, had shared the Iranian proposal with Washington.
The sides “keep changing their goalposts,” the Pakistani source said, adding, “We don’t have much time.”
CEASEFIRE MOSTLY HOLDING
The US-Israeli bombing killed thousands of people in Iran before it was suspended in a ceasefire in early April. Israel has killed thousands more and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes in Lebanon, which it invaded in pursuit of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group.
Iranian strikes on Israel and neighboring Gulf states have killed dozens of people.
The Iran ceasefire has mostly held, although drones have lately been launched from Iraq towards Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, apparently by Iran and its allies.
The US seized an Iran-linked oil tanker in the Indian Ocean overnight, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing three US officials. The tanker, known as the Skywave, was sanctioned by the US in March for its role in transporting Iranian oil, the report said.
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said they launched the war to curb Iran‘s support for regional militias, dismantle its nuclear program, destroy its missile capabilities, and create conditions for Iranians to topple their rulers.
But the war has yet to deprive Iran of its stockpile of near-weapons-grade enriched uranium or its ability to threaten neighbors with missiles, drones, and proxy militias.
The Islamic Republic’s clerical leadership, which had faced a mass uprising at the start of the year, withstood the superpower onslaught with no sign of organized opposition.
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Somaliland Says It Will Open an Embassy in Jerusalem, Israel to Reciprocate
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar meets with Somaliland President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: Screenshot
Somaliland, a self-declared republic in East Africa, will set up an embassy in Jerusalem soon, its ambassador said on Tuesday, after Israel became the first country to formally recognize it as an independent and sovereign state.
In turn, Israel is expected to set up an embassy in Somaliland‘s capital Hargeisa, Ambassador Mohamed Hagi said in a post on X.
Somaliland, which has claimed independence for decades but remains largely unrecognized, is situated on the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden and bordered by Djibouti to the northwest, Ethiopia to the south and west, and Somalia to the south and east. It has sought to break off from Somalia since 1991 and utilized its own passports, currency, military, and law enforcement.
Unlike most states in its region, Somaliland has relative security, regular elections, and a degree of political stability.
Last month, Israel appointed Michael Lotem as its first ambassador to Somaliland, after the two governments formally established full diplomatic relations.
Lotem, who was serving as a non-resident economic ambassador to Africa at the time of his appointment, will now shift to work as a non-resident ambassador to Somaliland. He previously served as Israel’s ambassador to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Seychelles, a position he concluded in August.
Israel recognized Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state in December, a move Somalia rejected and termed a “deliberate attack” on its sovereignty.
Over the years, Somalia has rallied international actors against any country recognizing Somaliland.
The former British protectorate hopes that recognition by Israel will encourage other nations to follow suit, increasing its diplomatic heft and access to international markets.
Israel‘s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Tuesday that the opening of the embassy in Jerusalem would be another significant step in strengthening relations with Somaliland. Once opened, the Somaliland embassy would be the eighth embassy in Jerusalem, he said.
Most countries maintain their embassies in Israel in Tel Aviv, although the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem during President Donald Trump’s first administration. Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and a small number of other countries have also established embassies there.
Israel considers all of Jerusalem to be its capital. However, Palestinians seek East Jerusalem, where the holiest sites in Judaism are located, as the capital of a future state.